Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

The evidence keeps coming in, over and over, like waves pounding on a beach. Many physicians aren’t happy with their EMRs, and the number of discontented doctors seems to be growing — with an undetermined but sizable number seeming likely to switch this year.

This time the evidence comes courtesy of the American College of Physicians and EMR selection site AmericanEHR Partners. A new study by the pair reports that physician satisfaction with EMRs dropped 12 percentage points between 2010 and 2012, and that the number who are “very dissatisfied” grew by 10 percentage points, FierceEMRreports.

These numbers, which were drawn from 4,279 responses to multiple surveys between March 2010 and December 2012, are a particularly strong reflection of the mood among smaller practices. Seventy-one percent of doctors/practices responding to the survey were in practices with 10 physicians or fewer, the ACP said.

These physicians seem downright upset with their current vendors. In fact, 39 percent of clinicians said they wouldn’t recommend their current EMR to a colleague, up sharply from the 24 percent who said the same in 2010.

According to the ACP, physicians feel their EMR is failing them in several key areas:

* Improving care: Doctors who were “very satisfied” with their EMR’s ability to improve care fell by 6 percent from 2010, while the “very dissatisfied” climbed 10 percent, with surgical specialists the least satisfied specialty.

* Decreasing workload: ACP found that 34 percent of users were “very dissatisfied” with their ability to decrease workload, up from just 19 percent in 2010.

* Return to pre-EMR productivity: The number of respondents who had not returned normal productivity after their EMR install was 32 percent in 2012, up from 20 percent in 2010.

* Ease of use: Dissatisfaction with EMR ease of use climbed to 37 percent in 2012, up from 23 percent in 2012, while satisfaction dropped from 61 to 48 percent.

That we’re seeing something of an EMR backlash seems obvious here. The question is, will unhappy physicians switch futilely and end up just as unhappy, or are they going to actually improve their experience?

2 responses to "Another Study Highlights Physician EMR Unhappiness"

I don’t think these studies are particularly useful, nor do I think they are representative of anything except themselves. I think it is wrong to draw any conclusions from them.

I don’t deny that there are a great number of poor EHR systems, poorly implemented, but the studies cited have two major failings:

o Not Representative. From what I can tell, the clinicians polled were not selected randomly. While the surveys were not self selecting, they are a close second. Polls such as this don’t give all involved an equal chance of being heard.

o Wrong Questions. Nothing published about these polls show that any attempt was made to judge where implementations went wrong. That is, instead of asking about requirements development, product selection process, or training, they just asked about happiness overall. This isn’t helpful if what you want to do is develop better processes.

The finding about regaining pre install productivity, for example, is subjective, when it begs for objective measures. How was productivity measured pre install, if at all? Is any weight given to the depth of documentation or error levels, pre and post, etc?

There is a major need to know what is going on with EHR implementations, but studies such as these are, frankly, a waste of time and money.

I disagree with Carol. For someone just starting up trying different EMR formats out there while using paper charts as a back up, we are frustrated finding things wrong with each EMR. It’s nice to know plain and simple I’m not the only one struggling. Everyone has to try the different EMR to find which one works best for them.